Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
According to the definition of polynomial functions, there may be expressions that obviously are not polynomials but nevertheless define polynomial functions. An example is the expression (), which takes the same values as the polynomial on the interval [,], and thus both expressions define the same polynomial function on this interval.
The image of a function f(x 1, x 2, …, x n) is the set of all values of f when the n-tuple (x 1, x 2, …, x n) runs in the whole domain of f.For a continuous (see below for a definition) real-valued function which has a connected domain, the image is either an interval or a single value.
For example the above polynomial expression is equivalent (denote the same polynomial as + + Many author do not distinguish polynomials and polynomial expressions. In this case the expression of a polynomial expression as a linear combination is called the canonical form , normal form , or expanded form of the polynomial.
On the other hand, a polynomial equation may involve several variables (the multivariate case), in which case the term polynomial equation is usually preferred. Some but not all polynomial equations with rational coefficients have a solution that is an algebraic expression that can be found using a finite number of operations that involve only ...
More concretely, an n-ary quadratic form over a field K is a homogeneous polynomial of degree 2 in n variables with coefficients in K: (, …,) = = =,. This formula may be rewritten using matrices: let x be the column vector with components x 1 , ..., x n and A = ( a ij ) be the n × n matrix over K whose entries are the coefficients of q .
In algebra, a multilinear polynomial [1] is a multivariate polynomial that is linear (meaning affine) in each of its variables separately, but not necessarily simultaneously. It is a polynomial in which no variable occurs to a power of 2 {\displaystyle 2} or higher; that is, each monomial is a constant times a product of distinct variables.
Typically, in a polynomial expression, like terms are those that contain the same variables to the same powers, possibly with different coefficients. More generally, when some variable are considered as parameters, like terms are defined similarly, but "numerical factors" must be replaced by "factors depending only on the parameters".
The distinction between a polynomial expression and the polynomial that it represents is relatively recent, and mainly motivated by the rise of computer algebra, where, for example, the test whether two polynomial expressions represent the same polynomial may be a nontrivial computation.